year 1845, there broke out in some of the
counties of Ireland one of those series of outrages which have hitherto
periodically occurred in districts of that country. Assassination and
crimes of violence were rife: men on the queen's highway were shot from
behind hedges, or suddenly torn from their horses and beaten to death
with clubs; houses were visited in the night by bodies of men, masked
and armed--their owners dragged from their beds, and, in the presence
of their wives and children, maimed and mutilated; the administration of
unlawful oaths, with circumstances of terror, indicated the existence of
secret confederations, whose fell intents, profusely and ostentatiously
announced by threatening letters, were frequently and savagely
perpetrated.

These barbarous distempers had their origin in the tenure of land in
Ireland, and in the modes of its occupation. A combination of causes,
political, social, and economical, had for more than a century unduly
stimulated the population of a country which had no considerable
resources except in the soil. That soil had become divided into minute
allotments, held by a pauper tenantry, at exorbitant rents, of a class
of middlemen, themselves necessitous, and who were mere traders in land.
A fierce competition raged amid the squalid multitude for these strips
of earth which were their sole means of existence. To regulate this
fatal rivalry, and restrain this emulation of despair, the peasantry,
enrolled in secret societies, found refuge in an inexorable code. He who
supplanted another in the occupation of the soil was doomed by an occult
tribunal, from which there was no appeal, to a terrible retribution. His
house was visited in the night by whitefeet and ribbonmen--his doom was
communicated to him, by the post, in letters, signed by Terry Alt, or
Molly M'Guire, or he was suddenly shot, like a dog, by the orders of
Captain Rock. Yet even these violent inflictions rather punished than
prevented the conduct against which they were directed. The Irish
peasant had to choose between starving and assassination. If, in
deference to an anonymous mandate, he relinquished his holding, he and
those who depended on him were outcasts and wanderers; if he retained or
accepted it, his life might be the forfeit, but subsistence was secured;
and in poor and lawless countries, the means of living are more valued
than life. Those who have treated of the agrarian crimes of Ireland
have remarked, t